THE CLINCHER WAS THE GUY who called from a train in Italy. It’s proof that one woman looking for a few good dates can capture international attention.
Attention is just what Yahoo Personals wanted when it put a 39-year-old woman up on a billboard for three days to troll the dating site and invite a few men in — er, outdoors.
Julie, a freelance screenwriter and Yahoo Personals subscriber, lived atop the Hollywood billboard for three days. Daily life — and eight dates — were broadcast worldwide 12 hours per day via Yahoo. Fans watched to see which guy Julie would ask back on the last day. (It was Clark, an Indy racecar mechanic.) Meanwhile, celebrities, stylists, reporters and DJs visited. Friends came to help Julie leaf through profiles.
The dates were on the billboard (and on-air), catered by local restaurants. A guitarist serenaded one; a comedian performed up top for another. The Web cam kept rolling. “We had a delete button, but we never used it,” says Sandra Cordova Micek, Yahoo Personals director of marketing. Yahoo did background checks on all potential dates. Most came from the site; one won a radio essay contest (Julie judged entries) and three were Yahoo Personals subscribers that Julie had already met.
The schedule was “busy but not exhausting,” Micek says, with enough content to interest online viewers and enough break time for Julie.
And the schedule stayed flexible. One DJ kept chatting with Julie after their on-air interview was over; Yahoo kept its own Web cam rolling for another hour. The DJ gave out his cell phone number to see if any of the online voyeurs would call. Many did, including an American traveling by train through Italy and watching Julie online.
“You don’t realize how many people see what you’re doing until you start getting the phone calls and e-mail,” Micek laughs.
And the satellite TV trucks start rolling into the parking lot at 5 a.m. “I got a phone call at 4:30 in the morning that the trucks were there and I had to get ready for interviews right away,” says Julie Koehnen (yes, the Julie). “I thought I’d just be hanging out with the Yahoo people, but this was really huge.”
Yahoo’s p.r. staff — part of the billboard campaign team from the beginning — was surprised by the media pickup they got. Interview requests piled in; tour buses detoured from “Homes of the Stars” to stop at the billboard for photo ops. “Some of the execution took on a life of its own,” says p.r. director Rochelle Adams. “The team members were great stewards for the brand.”
THE THREE-DAY CAMPAIGN wooed 6.4 million unique visitors to Yahoo Personals during first-quarter 2004, an impressive 44% boost from the year before. Better yet, subscriptions jumped 199%; creation of new subscriber profiles zoomed 250%.
The campaign kicked off Yahoo Personals’ “Project: Real People” advertising and promotion campaign that stars real subscribers. In 2003, Yahoo invited subscribers to submit their profile, then chose 50 to be brand ambassadors for a year. Yahoo’s marketing team was mulling the billboard idea when all 50 “real people” came to San Francisco for a July 2003 photo shoot. Staffers scanned the group for a billboard candidate.
Julie stood out. “She was really authentic — a fun, professional, busy young person. She embodied the attributes of Yahoo Personals,” says Micek.
Plus, she was the right age, a professional, living in LA and dating men locally — a crucial detail to position Yahoo Personals as real dating rather than online-only “dating.”
It was important to have a woman “because it’s more of a consideration for a woman to put herself out there” through online dating, Micek says.
Julie was reluctant to do the billboard at first. “Then they sent me a mock up of the billboard with my face on it,” Julie says.
“We told her, ‘We want to show that people like you use Yahoo Personals,’ and that we would portray her in the same light that we like to portray our brand,” Micek says. “We convinced her we would take care of her.”
“The Yahoo people were so smart and hip, and we had a great time at the photo shoot [for Project: Real People] that I thought it would be just four more days of hanging out with them,” she says.
“The immediate interaction with people was amazing. They’d e-mail me while I was up there, and respond [via e-mail] as fast as I read their messages on the Web cam. The Internet is so immediate and visceral,” Julie says.
Micek also credits teamwork: The cross-functional team (marketing, p.r., event marketing and design) worked together from start to finish on Yahoo’s first-ever live Web cam effort, and its biggest consumer promotion to date. Yahoo Personals’ marketing mavens Micek and Michelle Franzoia Cox spearheaded the team; Adams oversaw p.r. There were two staffers from the buzz marketing team, which serves as an event-marketing resource for all Yahoo divisions, and a few designers from Yahoo Personals’ own creative staff.
“A lot of companies talk about integrated marketing. This shows how a really good team pulls off a really good integrated marketing campaign,” Micek says.
Yahoo followed up the billboard blitz with Project: Real Valentines, splurging on dates for its Real People who set up a Valentine’s Day date with another Yahoo Personals subscriber. Meanwhile, Real People manned “smooch booths” in five cities, giving away kisses (real or chocolate, their choice) to booth visitors in high-traffic areas. Real People appeared at other events, including radio live-remotes, throughout the year.
Now Yahoo’s got a band of 60 Real People for 2005 ads and events. The 2004 open call prompted nearly 80,000 to enter, triple Yahoo’s 2003 entries.
And Julie? She and Clark have moved in together. “People are waiting for us to get married,” she says.
Indoors.
WHAT THE JUDGES SAID
“They did this so damned well.”
“Nothing else comes close to it.”
“Personal dating is such a dead-on trend right now.”
